Alma Katsu's The Hunger and The Double Sinister

Alma Katsu knew, even before writing her prizewinning 2018 novel The Hunger, that historical fiction is fraught with risks. That’s especially true when you are taking on an historical event as familiar as “the Donner Party,” a tragedy that has assumed an almost folkloric status in the American national imagination.

The Donner Party refers to a wagon train of some 90 pioneers headed to California in 1846. Forty members of the group starved to death when heavy snows stranded them in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Many of the survivors got through that winter by feeding on the flesh of their fallen fellow journeymen.

It is the taboo topic of cannibalism that keeps alive modern society's fascination with the Donner Party — not to mention that it is part of many schools' history curricula (Simon).

Less familiar are the details that led up to the nightmarish scenario of starvation and extreme survival, and the intertwining of personal hubris with larger, darker historical forces of nation-building. Indeed, the full story of the Donner party has been compared to “a Hitchcock film of westward expansion” in which the protagonists are hapless players in a nefarious scheme that will ultimately consume them (Deverell).

The Hunger cleverly builds upon the almost invisible operations of American colonization, using fiction to steer readers to another level of awareness, the achievement of which encourages a more resonant horror arising from the recognition that evil need not be rooted in the supernatural, but may nestled grub-like within the heart of Western culture.

Katsu refuses to go down the easy path of cannibal exploitation, and connects instead with the contemporary zeitgeist of divisiveness, distrust, and dread that defines the post-9/11 American sociopolitical experience.

This makes sense insofar as one of the strengths of the historical novel is its ability to “impart a vivid immediacy to past events” and allow the reader to “draw near” the unreachable past (Langan). By looking at the past, the historical novel also enables an examination of the present.

Indeed, Katsu goes so far as to see her novel as a cautionary tale for a society that has allowed itself to fall prey to pettiness, division, and pride. “You only need to look around to realize that things haven’t changed that much today” (Katsu, For Winter Nights).

But Katsu takes an even more adventurous route through the rocky pass of history by bringing her protagonists into conflict with an extraordinary menace. Like fellow American author Dan Simmons whose 2007 novel The Terror spins the disappearance in 1848 of a British naval expedition in the Arctic into a tale of monstrous horror, Katsu’s The Hunger “weaves a cocoon of supernatural horror around historical tragedy” (Lovegrove). What emerges from this interweave of horror and history is the sinister aspect of the metaphysical and philosophical underpinnings of Western society.

While Katsu maintains the element of cannibalism in The Hunger, she simultaneously heightens and sidelines it by imagining into the drama a pack of werewolf-like creatures that stalk the already doomed wagon train. The indigenous people of the area, the Washoe tribe, call the monsters the na’it. The tribal people are equally terrorized by these creatures and suffer as the na’it consume the region’s edible prey, creating an ecological imbalance that forces the tribe to survive on foraging and fishing — two skills the white pioneers lack.

An Old World Plague

The origins of this werewolf — Langan prefers the term lycanthrope — remains unsettled. The Washoe see the na’it as evil spirits that possess the bodies of their victims (Katsu 255). Another indigenous tribe, the fictional Anawai, are pushed to the point of worshiping the na’it, going so far as to make human sacrifices to “this wolf spirit” (78). But one of the novel’s primary protagonists (a journalist with experiential training in medicine and an interest in anthropology) is convinced that the curse which turns men into monsters should more rightly be seen as an illness, a “sickness” (255).

And like many diseases, the disease of lycanthropy may maintain an infective agent within non-symptomatic carriers. That carrier is the German immigrant Reiner Keseberg, a prospector who precedes the wagon train to pan for gold in the foothills that belong to the Washoe people. Reiner is introduced through the eyes of his nephew Lewis as a man of cunning whose “wolf-bright” eyes of fire “held sickening secrets.” Reiner brings from Europe the family trait of “epic and unpredictable” fury. Reiner tells his young nephew, when they meet in the United States, that the only ancestral inheritance he can expect is already “in your blood” (318-319, 321). What the Keseberg men carry within them is a “curse” that keeps them forever transitory, on the run. “If you stay in one place, they will catch you,” Reiner warns (321).

In 1840, Reiner follows his blood westward as a prospector into what is still tribal territory, an early representative of the national dream of Manifest Destiny that would lead to the full colonization of the tribal nations. Reiner seeks the freedom to allow his Old World curse an open expression without fear of the hangman’s noose: “Men like us can roam free” with nobody watching, he says (319). Six years after his departure, Reiner’s nephew Lewis will follow his own blood instinct and set off into the “untamed” West as part of the Donner Party pioneer caravan.

All who survive the bite of the na’it can expect full transformation into monstrosity. One of the first members of the wagon train to experience this change is Luke Halloran, who is suggested to have taken on the illness somehow from his own infected dog. Halloran’s gentle and generous personality is slowly replaced by something darker, stronger, and more vicious. As his friend Tamsen Donner observes the change, she sees that “He wasn’t himself; he wasn’t even a man” (141). In his cunning attack upon Tamsen, the newly turned na’it confesses that he is driven by the pain of a hunger that “hollows you.” “Even my blood is starving” (140).

What may be the last vestige of Halloran’s humanity reveals itself through an odd request: he asks Tamsen to willingly offer her flesh to him. “I could take it if I had to, from you or one of the others. …But I don’t want to do that. I’d rather you gave it to me freely, like a friend would” (140-141).

This one instance of the hunter expecting its prey to voluntarily give itself up echoes an indigenous attitude toward the animal world, a metaphysical view that leads the successful hunter to express both sorrow and gratitude to the animal that has just agreed to die so that the tribe may live (Kowtko 104).

Of course, here the novelist leaves herself open to criticism that her monstrous na’it are representative of the tribal people through whose land the wagon trains are trespassing (Langan). Katsu, however, sidesteps this criticism by including the Native people as victims of the na’it. Indeed, it is the European immigrant — the prospector Reiner Keseberg — who is suggested as the patient zero of the na’it, killing his fellow prospectors in camp before moving on to plague both the Native tribes and the trespassing California-bound wagon trains (Langan). 

From within the Donner Party caravan the younger Lewis Keseberg is making a less-obvious transformation, one that does not include the physical attributes of the na’it such as a snakelike unhinged jaw and a mouth lined with far too many sharp teeth. The change Lewis undergoes is an acknowledgment of his ability to contain the na’it sickness within himself and his ambiguous embrace of the craving for human flesh that comes with it. Unfortunately for Lewis “the taste of human blood never satiated him, but made the need for it even stronger” (366).

The Double Sinister: Metaphysical
In the Keseberg family and its journey from Germany and across the Midwestern plains Katsu provides a dual criticism of two of the most powerful philosophical forces of European history. The first of these is in the realm of metaphysics.

Italian writer Curzio Malaparte notes that “humans become more authentically human” in the forest. “Nothing makes men so mutually hostile … renders them so callous and inexorable, as the preternatural violence of the forest.” In the forest, he says, “man rediscovers his primordial instincts” (qtd. in Gray, Loc. 284).

It is only through the lens of Judeo-Christian theology that we can see why the “primordial” man’s “authentically human” aspect would be understood as violent: one of the earliest themes arising from ancient Judaism’s “holy books” is human existence is “only an unending struggle with our own nature” (Gray Loc. 845) in a world cursed by God after the fall of man and the expulsion from Paradise in the book of Genesis (Mann 194).

In The Hunger, Lewis’ abandoning of himself to his “blood nature” is suggested as being encouraged by the natural wildness of the environment. As one traumatized protagonist ponders: “Maybe that was the curse of these mountains — they turned you mad, then reflected your own madness back at you, incarnate. Like some sort of biblical punishment” (333).

The Western concept of the “wilderness” as empty, in contrast to the indigenous relationship with the land, is an obvious part of Katsu’s novel as she contrasts the tribal people’s ability to find nourishment with the European and American migrants’ starvation on the same ground. While the indigenous relationship with the land is symbiotic, the Euro-American invaders bring with them an assumption gleaned in part from Abrahamic sources that the earth is to be “subjugated” and “ruled over” by humanity.

It is no wonder that the first infliction of the na’it comes into the tribal lands through Reiner Keseberg, one of a camp of prospectors whose shovels and axes serve as monstrous teeth to devour the land. Like many such representatives of colonization in North America, the prospectors invaded tribal territories, sullied the tribes’ sacred geographies, and strove for both the physical and cultural genocide of the indigenous people.

The antebellum policies of the 1830 Indian Removal Act and the 1862 Homestead Act serve as legislative highlights of the political embrace in Washington DC of the ideological concept of Manifest Destiny and it’s justification of colonization and attempted genocide. White conquest was seen as a divine commandment, the land becoming “nothing more than a commodity to be subdued” along with the tribal people and their cultures (Mann 195).

Tragically, as some Native American scholars argue, the “terse situation created by the colonizers’ ambition, fear, misunderstanding, and lack of respect” for indigenous boundaries “is still a major problem for many Native Americans today” (Talamantez 280). One of the most recent examples of this, unarguably, is the legal maneuvering by the Trump Administration in mid-September 2019 to shut down lawsuits brought about by Native American tribal lawyers to block the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to Nebraska and across their tribal nations’ lands (Brown).

The Double Sinister: Philosophical
If the prospectors-turned-na’it are a monstrous icon of an ancient Western cultural legacy inherited from the Judeo-Christian sources, the wagon train of migrants and their final group leader — Lewis Keseberg — portray another branch of European heritage that has proven venomous to both the indigenous people and their lands in North America.

Lewis is the personification of the values arising from the European philosophical project of the Enlightenment.

Emerging from a variety of sources, but most especially from the rise of scientific and technological advances, the Enlightenment was a defining period of Western history that found its full stride in the Eighteenth Century. Through the multivariate influences that gave rise to Enlightenment thinking, Europeans “awoke to a new sense of life” in which they “experienced an expansive sense of power over nature and themselves” (Gay 3).

The Eighteenth Century was what Peter Gay calls “the age of political arithmetic,” when the modern academic study of economics was born and the influence of thinkers such as Adam Smith helped deliver from the womb of the Enlightenment the ever-transitioning but still-powerful chimeric behemoth called Capitalism (344). In the hands of the Enlightenment’s most strident advocates, economics achieved ascendency over every other discipline, including statesmanship (Gay 345). What then rose is the reliance upon accountancy as a sociocultural value necessary for the management of all aspects of the human experience — an ascendancy that remains at full height in today’s Neoliberal world.

Among the pioneers in The Hunger who survived to see the wagon train through to the novel’s snow-encrusted denouement, Lewis Keseberg is by far the most “numeric.” In her final encounter with him, Tamsen Donner recalls how even at the start of the migration westward the other travelers had developed an aversion to playing cards with Lewis, whose mathematically talented mind enabled him to win games by what we today would call the strategy of “counting cards” (365).

When the snows fall for many weeks it is Lewis who steps forward to keep the remaining travelers — mostly children by this point — alive through the careful harvesting of those who die of starvation. Lewis puts his mathematically inclined mind to the calculation of how much flesh would be needed to feed himself and the other survivors, with some set aside for the na’it — “Just enough so they won’t come sniffing around too close to camp” (365).

Taking from his pile of carefully piled corpses Lewis calculates how many more will be needed to maintain the migrant camp through the remaining weeks of winter. It is an accounting that the other pioneers are unaware of. Indeed, they do not know that it is human flesh butchered from the frozen bodies of their deceased kin that Lewis is using to keep them barely alive, even as he shows no sign of starvation. “I saved ‘em all” from starvation, Lewis brags. “They’d never agree to it. …But it’s the only way to live. …they just don’t want to have to know where it’s from” (365).

Placing the blame for the cannibalism upon the shoulders of a monstrous figure enervated by an ancient blood disease is a clever narrative strategy, argues New York Times reviewer Danielle Trussoni. “With blame shifted to the spirit world, we’re off the hook, and able to relax and enjoy the journey” (Trussoni). The unspoken suspicion remains in Katsu’s novel that the survivors understand the nature of the nourishment offered to them by Lewis. They just don’t want to have to know. Of course, it is easy to understand that they would choose to remain within their snowbound shelters, their eyes closed to the horrible reality around them. But that does not relieve them of culpability in the cannibalism of their deceased families and fellow travelers.

The survivors, in their complicity, join Lewis as representative of the Enlightenment values that allowed them to play walk-on parts in the larger drama of colonization and attempted genocide. Violence, after all, is the final result of Enlightenment ideals taken to their extreme, as argued by cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida, among others. The Enlightenment principle of “pure practical reason” (as put forth in Immanual Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason first published in 1781) is essentially “an act of war” that is “hateful, cruel, criminal, incriminating” and ultimately result in “death … and murder” (Derrida 101). Derrida maintains this critique of Cartesian ethics in his examination of animality and what he sees as the human “war” against animals, but is swift to note the applicability of his interrogation to the other “taboo” animal: “the animal in man” (103).

Derrida’s (and Adorno’s) condemnation of Enlightenment ethics sees the “rational” man as essentially violent, with the expression of “this project of human mastery over nature and over animality” (Derrida 102) being revealed in a war against all animal life. Sadly, this vision of the Enlightenment experience resulting in something of an apocalyptic embrace of what Sigmund Freud speculated as the human psyche’s death drive, is too easily imagined in the current age of climate change, when unchecked fires threaten the rainforests of Brazil and Indonesia, and majority supported fascist leadership returns to power in diverse nation states.

It is this zeitgeist that Katsu skillfully addresses in The Hunger and its expression of ecological distress brought about by all-too-(in)human monstrosities — abjection that springs not from the earth, but from the metaphysical and philosophical myths out of which Euro-American subjectivity arose. The most gripping horror in The Hunger is the unspoken history beneath this historical fiction. 


Related Links:

This is Horror Podcast Interview with Alma Katsu

The Inside Flap Podcast Interview with Alma Katsu

More to Read Interview with Alma Katsu

Alma Katsu Author Homepage

Alma Katsu Wikipedia Entry



Works Cited

Brown, Matthew. “Trump Administration Wants Tribes’ Keystone XL Lawsuit Dismissed.” The Associated Press. Global News. 10 September 2019. Online: https://globalnews.ca/news/5883513/trump-keystone-pipeline-lawsuit/?utm_expid=.kz0UD5JkQOCo6yMqxGqECg.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fglobalnews.ca%2Fnews%2F5883513%2Ftrump-keystone-pipeline-lawsuit%2F

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. David Wills, Trans. Marie-Louise Mallet, Ed. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP. 2008. Online Limited Google View: https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=y8Drc-QghEIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+animal+that+therefore+i+am&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQvbL3j9rkAhUewosBHY74AlIQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=the%20animal%20that%20therefore%20i%20am&f=false

Deverell, William. “The Lasting Pull of the Donner Saga.” Los Angeles Times. 22 March 2019. Online: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-mar-22-ca-gabrielle-burton22-story.html

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Science of Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton. 1969.

Gray, John. The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. New York: Farrar, Strous, and Girous. 2014. Ebook. Online Limited Google View: https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=xNgPCHwTcF8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Gray,+John.+Animal&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqufH5jdrkAhUpK6YKHYwHAEQQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=Gray%2C%20John.%20Animal&f=false

Katsu, Alma. The Hunger. New York: Putnam. 2018.

---. “History and The Hunger: Guest Post by Alma Katsu, Author of The Hunger.” For Winter Nights: A Bookish Blog. 5 March 2018. Online: https://forwinternights.wordpress.com/2018/03/05/history-and-the-hunger-guest-post-by-alma-katsu-author-of-the-hunger/

Kowtko, Stacy. Nature and the Environment in Pre-Columbian American Life. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P. 2006. Online Limited Google View: https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=imVo2JUAF2AC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Langan, John. “John Langan Reviews The Hunger by Alma Katsu.” Locus. 29 May 2018. Online: https://locusmag.com/2018/05/john-langan-reviews-the-hunger-by-alma-katsu-and-the-teardrop-method-by-simon-avery/

Lovegrove, James. “Short Review: The Hunger by Alma Katsu.” Financial Times. 1 June 2018. Online: https://www.ft.com/content/ffefbbd2-591b-11e8-806a-808d194ffb75

Mann, Henrietta. “Earth Mother and Prayerful Children: Sacred Sites and Religious Freedom.” Native Voices: American Indian Identity & Resistance. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins. Eds. Lawrence: UP of Kansas. 2003. 194-208.

Simon, Scott. “Teaching the Grim Reality of the Donner Party.” NPR. 7 March 2015. Online: https://www.npr.org/2015/03/07/391435893/teaching-the-grim-reality-of-the-donner-party

Talamantez, Inez. “Transforming American Perceptions about Native America: Vine Deloria Jr., Critic and Coyote.” Native Voices: American Indian Identity & Resistance. Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and David E. Wilkins. Eds. Lawrence: UP of Kansas. 2003. 273-289.

Trussoni, Danielle. “Summer Reads: Horror.” New York Times Book Review. 23 May 2019. Online: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/books/best-horror-novels.html

Click to go to source of Graphic Image

When More is Better?

I came across a short piece in a 2011 edition of "Scientific American Mind" entitled "The Power of Negative Thinking." The article noted research suggesting that both the experience of something painful (physically or emotionally) and the expectation that we will experience that same negative sensation again actually enables us to go through repeated experiences with less discomfort.

My mind immediately went to the horror film audience, or at least the ones who enjoy repeated and similar experiences of shock, disgust, fear, through the medium of film. So once you've seen a realistically believable beheading on film, you can go on watching various slasher films where the heads go thunk as they hit the ground. It's not so terrible the second time around.

But then I remember other suggestions that viewing horror and experiencing those "negatively charged" emotions is a positive thrill, something enjoyable and even desirable. Does that mean that once you lose the "thrill" or the ability to be shocked and scared, you no longer enjoy horror cinema as much? Or perhaps I should say that you no longer "desire" seeing a film that promises similar scenes of gore and violence? Does this lead to falling ticket sales for sequels far down a franchise assembly line? Or does this explain why so many viewers demand the same old "slash" but offered in new and creative ways?

French "Zombi Child" Calls Upon Voodoo Tropes

We don’t often see the traditional African-Haitian zombie trope in contemporary cinema, but French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello has made use of this icon of colonial slavery in his new film Zombi Child. The folkloristic zombie — a corpse revived by a powerful magician for the purpose of providing free agricultural labor — is used by the director to address contemporary issues of racism and an ongoing legacy of class-based biases within modern French society.

With dual narratives, the film begins in 1962 with the burial of recently deceased Clairvius Narcisse, his awakening from the grave with aphasic and amnesiac, and forced into labor on the sugarcane fields each night.

The story of Clairvius and his gradual reclamation of speech, memory, and social freedom is interspersed with the present-day life of his granddaughter Melissa as she makes friends and comes to recognize the invisible and unspoken structures of power as gradually revealed in the workings of an elite Parisian girl’s school.

Andrew Spitznas, blogging for the Patheos website, emphasizes the intellectual strength of the film, noting that the director-screenwriter not only uses Zombi Child to examine experiences of otherness, disenfranchisement, cannibalistic capitalism, mourning and loss, but also to interrogate the arguments of influential European intellectuals and philosophers.

Jonathan Romney said in his ScreenDaily review of the film after viewing it at the Cannes Film Festival: "Mixing political commentary, ethnography, teenage melodrama and genre horror, the film is an unashamedly cerebral study of multiple themes — colonialism, revolution, liberalism, racial difference and female desire — with its unconventional narrative structure taking us a journey that’s as intellectually demanding as it is compelling."

The film’s narrative structure leads to what Slant magazine reviewer Sam C. Mac calls “a feverish payoff, one that uses genre and supernatural elements to further Bonello’s idea of there being one historical continuity.”

All reviewers agree in identifying Bonello’s Zombi Child as a work of supernatural horror developed upon the fertile soil of sociopolitical critique. Bonello said in an interview that both his interest in French history and the Romero zombie encouraged him to look backward to the Voodoo origins of the modern horror icon.

"I wanted to trace (the pop horror icon) to its origins, to something much more real and human," Bonello said, "because these people (zombies of folklore), they’re not dead — theoretically they’re people that don’t find a place in hell, so they come back to earth. They’re alive, they’re between life and death, between night and day."

Here’s a link to an English-subtitled trailer, though as is so often the case with YouTube you’re going to have to sit through a few seconds of advertisement before you can go directly to the trailer. As far as I can tell, the film is not yet available for sale or streaming.